Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The UNIGIS Salzburg team is advising prospective students in their MSc and professional certificate programs at this year's Intergeo exhibit on Cologne, Germany. Interest in obtaining a widely recognized advanced qualification in Geoinformatics / GIScience continues to draw numerous visitors. At this increasingly international event Asia plays an important role, very much in line with the overall development of the UNIGIS program. Of course, as always, the UNIGIS booth is an important meeting place for the many UNIGIS alumni working at Intergeo or just attending the exhibits.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

On September 21st, UNIGIS co-organized the first Latin American Conference on GIS-Education (http://www.sigsa.info/lauc2010/edu.html) in cooperation with ESRI. The conference was hosted by ESRI’s Mexican representative SIGSA (http://www.sigsa.info) and brought together GIS-users, teachers and other faculty from all over Latin America. A curriculum development workshop was held by the director of the UNIGIS program in Latin America, Richard Resl from the University San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Nearly 200 participants discussed common goals and challenges for developing and implementing up-to-date GI curricula that satisfy the specific needs of students and professionals in order to meet the growing demand for high quality GIS-Education in Latin America.

Monday, October 4, 2010

The UNIGIS International Association (UIA) would like to announce this year’s winners of its worldwide Academic Excellence Prize. The Prize, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, who submits the best MSc thesis (or paper based on their thesis) during the academic year. This year the competition was very tight with six excellent high quality MSc theses and a paper being considered by the UIA Review Board. In the end the panel decided to make three awards.

Eva Willerslev from UNIGIS Manchester has been announced as the winner of the UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize 2010. Her thesis titled “Methods of extracting a coastline from satellite imagery and assessing the accuracy” was considered unanimously by the Review Board as the best thesis this year.

In second place is Pedro Sarmento from UNIGIS Portugal, with a paper “Incorporating reference classification uncertainty into the analysis of land cover accuracy”.

In the third place is Hans-Jörg Stark from UNIGIS Sakzburg, with the thesis "Quality assurance of crowdsourced geocoded address-data within OpenAddresses - Concepts and Implementation".

Congratulations! The Review Board would like to commend these individuals for the high quality of their research.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

UNIGIS Salzburg students were attending a September 24/25 workshop presenting and discussing their thesis projects. More than 20 topics ranging across a variety of application domains, from a methodology focus to systems implementation and from business cases to educational perspectives demonstrated the enormous width and depth of GIScience!
The UNIGIS Salzburg team is wishing everybody well with the final stages of their MSc thesis - and congratulates Thomas Purfürst who was first with submitting his work on GNSS signal quality under forest canopy.